For me, 1955 was a memorable year even before the Dodgers’ miracle unfolded that October. In addition to school and neighborhood and family, I was blessed by music in my life—singing and intense piano work. During the summer, I somehow got through the audition process at the Metropolitan Opera and was selected for the boys’ chorus, a job I would hold until I was washed up with a useless baritone at thirteen. There are no words to describe the thrill of actually spending time on a stage with the likes of Maria Callas, Richard Tucker, and Rise Stevens; it was another world, where the most exacting kind of work mixed with the exhilaration of performance on a truly grand stage.
Many children work hard to please their parents, but what I truly longed for was good times that were about us, not me. That is the real hole the Dodgers filled in my life. Like any Dodger family, my father and mother filled me with the long, losing lore, taught me to keep a box score, and helped me find the smaller joys with which to battle annual disappointments—a metaphor I had no trouble grasping. So many of the genuine pleasures I saw them experience in those years involved the Dodgers, which only deepened the attraction.
Life was always busy and usually exciting in its variety and bustle, but it was also defined and confined by the reality inside that little apartment.
There were ten units on our floor, comprising a rent-controlled mosaic of New York life—including a young UN diplomat from Canada, a budding solo pianist, a war widow and secretary like my mother, another younger couple, and a music critic for The New York Times, who had been traumatized by his experiences as a medic during the war and was often in our apartment to monitor my progress and talk through his wartime experiences with my father.
Our apartment had an entrance hall maybe fifteen feet long, which I used for sliding practice by putting a pillow against the front door. The hall contained our one closet, which my mother had somehow divided into four compartments. It opened into a single room that faced north. To the left was what might charitably be called a kitchenette; it consisted of a small refrigerator of the size many people now keep in their offices. The counter had room for a sink and a two-burner hot plate on which all our cooking had to be done (meaning frying, boiling, pressure-cooking, but no baking and broiling, to my mother’s intense frustration).
Against one wall was our aging Steinway upright; jutting out from the corner next to it was our only other valuable possession, a 21-inch RCA television set, which had been there since the preceding Christmas and was called Scarlet by my mother—a marvelous name that had nothing to do with color television, then in its commercial infancy, or with Ms. O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. In early December of 1954, I had come down with a slight case of scarlet fever that was quickly followed by double pneumonia, the only time in my life I was ever truly sick. In bed and bored out of mind, I was rescued within a few days by the arrival of a large box that turned out to be the television, sent by the father of one of my classmates who had me out regularly for companionship at the family’s weekend home (to me it was more like a palace) at Port Washington on Long Island. The father was one of my first heroes I actually knew—then the president of NBC, the famously innovative Sylvester L. “Pat” Weaver, father of the Today and Tonight shows, pusher of the programming envelope during television’s Golden Age until the business powers stopped him. He was exceptionally kind and interested in my busy life, and his daughter was one of the first girls I actually liked (she was known as Susan then; today she is the actress Sigourney Weaver). When the holidays had ended and I had recovered enough to go back to school, my mother called Mr. Weaver’s office to arrange for the set’s return. She was told that either it would go to the Salvation Army or stay in the apartment; it stayed. In honor of my fortuitous illness, the set was quickly christened Scarlet.
The television was not the only big change that wonderful year. We also got rid of the apartment’s major eyesore—one of those old pullout Murphy beds that came out of the wall opposite the windows—and in the process acquired our first real dining table for the vacated space. By coincidence, my parents had gone shopping in Greenwich Village two days before Game Seven and managed to find a secondhand relic they were able to fit into a Checker cab for the ride home. The result was not only a dining table (until then we ate on a card table that magically fit in that carefully stuffed closet) but also room above it for makeshift bookshelves for my father’s most precious possessions, which had been arranged before that in stacks on the floor of the bedroom and on top of our two dressers. The place must have driven them to distraction, but I was too young and too small to notice. We talked about everything in that little apartment, with the glaring exception of the pain and frustration of my parents’ struggle.
I have no childhood memory of my father wailing at the moon over his illnesses or his inability to work steadily; I never heard my mother vent any feelings about the double duty she performed without complaint. And yet I could see they had it tough. My father’s pain was inescapably obvious; often, in the evenings, I watched my mother nod off early while trying to read. This is why singing professionally meant so much to me, not merely for the glamour and excitement but also for the chance to hand my pay to my mother after a performance. I didn’t know how to express myself, but I knew that was often the grocery money. (Before I left for college she had replaced every penny.)
This is partly why baseball and the Dodgers meant so much to me. When there was a game—and especially when there was a World Series—all the excitement and hope and concentration involved all three of us to the obliteration of our cares. We shared the Dodgers; they were a metaphor and an oasis.
On that morning of the second seventh game of my conscious life, the team suffused the atmosphere of our apartment, mercifully.
The first words out of my father’s mouth after he had occupied his regular post in the chair next to the piano were jarring. He said I looked terrible and was I feeling ill. I remember both being puzzled and insisting I felt fine, but my father would not relent. Did I feel flushed? Had I been coughing? Did I sleep all right? Did I feel at all nauseous?
By then, my mother was in the room, and after a few more of these confusing diagnostic questions she began to laugh, all the while being gently disapproving.
Then I got it. In typically overdramatic fashion, my wonderful father was encouraging me to feign illness. I was fully prepared to endure the inevitable seventh-game torture at school, but here was my father signaling that for this momentous, but frightening, final game of the World Series we could be together in the apartment, watching the action on Scarlet. It would be no less scary but a lot less lonely.
I laughed, too, as my father gestured to my mother to be still while he reached for the telephone to call my school. He transmitted the details of my unfortunate illness with appropriate solemnity and then put the phone down and winked broadly. My mother was happily in on the conspiracy and began divulging her own plans to experience the game. There was always a television set in her law firm’s conference room and she wanted to watch, but that meant being around all the firm’s partners, which meant Yankee fans. Nearly all the secretaries she knew were Dodger or New York Giants fans, so she expected to eventually migrate to the room where they took their coffee breaks, and imagine the game via the radio.
My father was feeling better that morning, so when we had finished eating we escorted my mother up 42nd Street to her subway stop. On the way back we stopped at the newsstand where we always stopped to buy the papers my parents allowed into the apartment—the Times, the Herald Tribune, and their favorite, the avowedly liberal New York Post. The guy selling papers, Tommy, was one of the neighborhood fixtures, a friendly guy in his twenties whose cousin was a fairly well-known and highly ranked lightweight boxer, Johnny Busso; he had once arranged seats for us at the old Madison Square Garden for one of his fights, much to my mother’s horror.
The neighborhood was more a collection of these characters to me than a collection of buildings down by the East River. John Tomkins, who couldn’t hear and couldn’t speak, worked at the shoe store on 43rd Street and taught me sign language; Ray ran a candy store named after him around the corner on Third Avenue where kids like me bought bubblegum for a nickel in packages with five baseball cards and parents could get a bet down on the daily number; Huey Balboni jerked the sodas in the diner on 42nd and Second and then in the drugstore in Tudor City, always giving me two pumps of cherry syrup with my Coca-Cola; the day shift elevator operators in our building were actually named Tom and Jerry, the former formal and meticulous, the latter joyously loud and not always sober; and Louis Christopolous (he had lost a leg in Sicily) sold the fruit my mother bought on the way home from the subway never failing to compliment her appearance with elaborate charm. I got to play with friends in luxurious apartments on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, but I was convinced I lived in heaven. It was self-contained, protective, friendly, a little odd, safe, fun, and a delightful mixture of the rigorous education that I got in my apartment and the introduction to the delights of diversity I got on the street.
My deal with my father that day was that I would finish my piano and some schoolwork in the morning and then we would devour the sports pages, make some lunch, and get ready as best we could for a game neither of us expected to turn out well. The sixth game had been such a swift, convincing, and deflating defeat, accentuated by the shellacking of one of my mother’s favorites (Karl Spooner) and a knee injury to the team’s star center fielder, Duke Snider. The sports pages oozed Yankee inevitability; the bookies made them 7–5 favorites. I was happy to be home from school but dreading the game.
By 1955 I knew what to expect. It was normal for the Golden Era Dodgers to win a pennant; they were almost as dominant in the National League as the Yankees were in the American and had won five pennants in the nine years after Jackie Robinson joined them. The heart of the batting order (Snider, Hodges, Campanella, outfielder Carl Furillo, and Robinson) would hit its customary ton of home runs, Don Newcombe would win twenty games, Carl Erskine would win eleven, and the journeymen and newcomers of the year, backed by superb relief pitching from Clem Labine and Ed Roebuck, would get enough others to clinch the pennant early. Like any young baseball fan, I knew my team backward and forward—from the left-handed hitting Snider’s famous problems with left-handed pitchers, to the magical arm that made Furillo an outfielder base runners rarely tested, to the way Sandy Amoros wagged his bat just before swinging.
They were also accessible heroes. The Yankees’ Mickey Mantle, even to his own fans, was distant glamour, almost a movie star. Even to me, the Dodgers weren’t gods; they were people, easier to live and die with.
As it turned out, 1955 was the year I felt I almost lived at Ebbets Field. My father or my mother, or both, took me to at least a dozen games on their own, at which we always sat in the outfield bleachers. A special opportunity, though, came out of a rare break for my father. There was a man in our neighborhood, Saul Paul, whose brother, Gabe, was the general manager of the Cincinnati Reds—just then emerging as a slugging powerhouse, which would finally win a pennant in 1961. My father and Mr. Paul were casual friends from watching me and my neighborhood friends’ progress from the sandbox to the sandlots, and out of their acquaintance came a magazine assignment for a profile of Gabe Paul. The article was what we call in the news business a feature story, and he must have loved it, because he invited us to be his guests that season whenever the Reds were in town. In those days, when eight teams in the National League played 154 games against each other, that meant 9 or 10 more games for us.
I had never sat in a box seat. For a nine-year-old to be so close to real major leaguers was beyond heaven, and these seats were in the first row behind the visitors’ dugout on the third base side. The three of us made the pilgrimage to every game—days, nights, and weekends, including doubleheaders. One night, I watched in awe as Jackie Robinson scored all the way from first on an extra base hit; this close, he seemed five times as fast, and I remember being briefly startled when he took a wide turn around third and appeared to be running right at me. I could hear him breathe.
The next inning was for my mother. Her favorite Dodger was Roy Campanella; she called him Roly Poly in her Midwest twang and considered him cute. Someone on the Reds hit a foul ball far into the night sky, and when it came down into Campanella’s huge mitt, he could not have been standing ten feet from us. It was the first time I ever saw my mother blush.
Part of the joy of life with the Dodgers was that it was intimate. In Ebbets Field, the feeling was akin to that on the sandlots; you were watching people you felt you knew very well, whose faults as well as skills were equally understood and appreciated. For most of the season in those years, the experience was almost blissful. To make it even more pleasurable in those years, the Dodgers were almost always either in the thick of the pennant race or way out in front.
Beginning in September, however, you learned the meaning of dread with this team as the World Series approached; you came to anticipate it. From my first baseball consciousness in 1950, I was evolving into the typical Dodger fan who knew hope but also knew history. The dread also had a rational component. The Dodgers matched the Yankees in powder and speed; they were arguably even a little stronger. The Yankees, however, consistently had one or two more quality pitchers, usually the key in a short series, while the Dodgers were assumed to start out in trouble because their workhorse (Don Newcombe) was such a notorious autumnal disappointment after a spring and summer of overwork. As the World Series approached, the talk in our house and all over town was that the Dodgers needed a starter to win two of the games if their hitters were to be counted on to win two more for the championship. The problem was that none dared confidently predict who that pitcher might be.
For me, the World Series in 1955 began in my school’s gymnasium. Somehow I had a scholarship at one of the city’s fantastic private schools, Browning, the first true break in life for me after being born to parents who adored learning. In baseball terms, though, it was terrible, because the place was filled with kids from quite wealthy families who were nearly all Yankee fans. The only Dodger fan classmate I remember, and remember very fondly, was John Steinbeck’s son—also the only fellow political leftie. Together we endured taunts about the Dodgers as well as those about Adlai Stevenson.
The taunts were especially strong as the World Series of 1955 began with two boilerplate nightmares at Yankee Stadium. Newcombe was ineffective, and the Yankees had two skilled and crafty left-handed starters that year—the famous Whitey Ford and the solid veteran Tommy Byrne, each of whom had been methodically masterful. Even a nine-year-old knew that fifty-two years into World Series history no team had yet come back to win after losing the first two games.
That made the Dodgers’ victory, 8–3, in the first of three Ebbets Field games, in what was the sixth so-called Subway Series since the war, seem less significant. There had been a Dodger hitting eruption, to be sure, and this kid from upstate, Johnny Podres, had pitched a marvelous complete game on his twenty-third birthday. The timely hitting and clutch pitching carried over to the second victory in Brooklyn as well, a win made all the more satisfying because my parents and I enjoyed it together, with a family in the neighborhood; we laughed and yelled, so lost in the Dodger victory that no one remembered to keep score. The past, however, still hovered like a dark cloud over our happy Saturday.
Dread and history were forgotten, at least by me, for the final game in Brooklyn the next afternoon. It was the first World Series game I got to see in person. There was a nice lady who lived on our floor in 2509, a war widow who had no kids of her own and doted a bit on me. To this day, it grates on me that I cannot remember her name. We visited back and forth; my mother and she usually did their weekly shopping together and sometimes took in a movie. When my father was especially sick and my mother was with him in the hospital, this neighbor would often look after me in the evenings.
Bless her heart, she had two outfield bleacher seats to the fifth game from someone at work and asked my parents if she could take me. This was one subway ride I remember vividly. As always, we exited past one of the Ebbets Field environs’ most colorful characters, a blind man who sold pencils. For years his routine had been to offer, for a nickel, to give the score before the game had even started; for thousands of the gullible, the answer never varied: “Nothin’ to nothin’.” When we walked up the ramp into the grandstand, the sight of the red, white, and blue bunting draped over all the railings was majestic; the fact that all thirty-six-thousand-plus seats and standing places were occupied only added to the thrill.
The game was a fan’s delight. In the 5–3 Dodger victory, Duke Snider hit two home runs and Sandy Amoros one. For the Yankees, home runs were hit by reserve outfielder Bob Cerv and the only catcher of those days in Campanella’s league, Yogi Berra. Five home runs in one World Series game, with three innings of clutch relief from Clem Labine on top of the four-plus he had pitched the day before to get the win. My parents had listened to the game on the radio at a friend’s apartment, so I was quizzed on every detail when I burst through the door and babbled on long past dinner.
It was a doubly special evening and included the christening of our new dining table. It seemed a fittingly formal setting for my rambling, self-indulgent discourse on the game.
The dread had only been postponed, however, and the sixth game the next day made my mother particularly heartsick. With some girlfriends from work she had witnessed at the end of the previous season the debut of one of the true legends in the annals of Dodger tragedy. His name was Karl Spooner and he was a natural. The left-handed pitcher not only shut out the Giants but also struck out fifteen of them, and ended the season by shutting out the Pirates while striking out twelve of them. Spooner, another upstate New Yorker, became the personification of Wait’ll Next Year. My mother claimed he was clearly a better prospect than another left-hander who had been on the team for two years, Johnny Podres, and she insisted Spooner’s control was much better than that of the third kid left-hander then on the roster. He was nineteen, a Brooklyn boy, and a so-called bonus baby signed for twenty thousand dollars out of the University of Cincinnati, which meant he had to stay on the active squad for two years, which also meant he mostly rode the bench. His name was Sandy Koufax.
Spooner had a promising spring, but his arm and then his control started to go as 1955 wore on, and he only won eight games. Manager Walter Alston’s decision to start Spooner in the sixth game was instantly second-guessed all over town, unanimously in my household. When Spooner proceeded to get shelled in the first inning, the I Told You Sos were deafening. What no one knew was that with his arm a wreck, he would never throw another pitch in the major leagues.
That evening, I mostly remember us grumbling about Alston’s decision, a convenient means of avoiding the sinking feeling about the next day. What had already happened in five out of five World Series in just fourteen years seemed about to happen again.
What I remember even more sharply is that my father got very sick after supper. His major ailment then was a collection of continually bleeding ulcers that sometimes required a few days in the hospital and more bills to juggle. It was a particularly unpleasant night. I was never ashamed or embarrassed by my father’s rough life; I was fiercely proud of his service in the war and in awe of my mother’s quiet strength in holding us just above water. What I hated was the sadness he couldn’t always hide.
On the night before the seventh game of the 1955 World Series there was not a molecule of hope in our apartment. Life with the Dodgers was so often a painfully real metaphor.
Little did we know.